scream
-
“Is That a 58 Degree Dutch Tilt?”: DP Brett Jutkiewicz on Scream
In the latest Scream installment, “elevated horror” and “requels” are among the contemporary genre trends affectionately deconstructed. The movie also lobs a little friendly fire toward the 1990s slasher revival that birthed the series—a character quips, “It was really over-lit and everyone had weird hair.” There’s not much cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz can do about the latter, but the former served as a gauntlet thrown down. “When you have a line like that in the script, as a DP you think, ‘I guess I better not over-light this thing. I don’t want to end up as the butt of my own joke,’” […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Apr 11, 2022 -
“Requel”-ing Wes Craven: Radio Silence on Scream (2022)
There may be no horror franchise that opens with as simple and satisfying a tradition as Scream. As the production company’s logo appears on screen, we begin hearing the ringing of a landline phone—if you’ve seen only one of Scream’s now five installments, you immediately know whose voice will be on the other line. Reeling in a character with a false sense of comfort before swiftly posing a question everyone in the audience would affirmatively respond to (“do you like scary movies?”), the soon-to-be-victim begins to realize what we already know: if they can’t answer three specific slasher-film trivia questions, they’ll […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 14, 2022 -
Watch: Charlie Lyne’s Copycat, A Short Film About the Proto-Scream
This short film by Charlie Lyne (whose zippy, highly enjoyable essay/compilation film about teen movies, Beyond Clueless, is still available on Netflix Instant) tells the story of Rolfe Kanofsky, a pioneer who maybe got scalped. Barely out of high school, Kanofsky made a meta-reflexive horror film, There’s Nothing Out There, that bears a suspicious relationship to Scream. Did Wes Craven’s son having seen it have anything to do with it? Whatever the case, Copycat is a fun watch; bonus points for making the whole thing plausibly seem as if it were being watched on a beaten-up VHS.
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 18, 2015 -
NOT QUITE A TOP TEN
There’s a fun piece in The Guardian today by John Patterson in which he lays out his ten films that made today’s cinema. It’s not a “ten best” list but instead a “ten most influential,” and not in a fussy, highbrow sort of way either. For example, here’s Patterson on his numbers four and five: “4. The Brady Bunch Movie (Betty Thomas, 1995) and 5. Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). Released within six months of each other, these were the first smart-ass stepchildren of the self-referential post-Pulp Fiction effect. The only refreshing way to rehash the blandly inoffensive 70s Bradys was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 19, 2005
